The Arizona sentinel., 1887-05-14

alone have been formed. Denudation, though it has not as some imagine, left the lunar craters alone, has taken comparatively little from their impos- ing dimensions. In other words, little material has been borrowed from the craters to make mountain ranges. Con- sequently, the mountain ranges of the moon are few, and they can not be com pared, either in length or height, with the chief mountain ranges on the earth.
 The moon in this not only tells us of the past of our earth and explains how our mountain ranges have been formed, but enables us also to read the meaning of those more ancient mount ain ranges on the earth which, because of their greater age, have been in great part worn down. These and these alone correspondent with the mount ain ranges on the moon. Or, rather. if any do, these are they. But quite probably all the really ancient mount ain ranges in the earth have long since disappeared.
 But just here point of considerable interest arises. Since there are mount ain ranges on the moon, these must presumably have been formed as the mountain ranges on the earth were formed long since. Now all our mount ain ranges were formed under water, as we have seen. May we not, then, infer, with at least considerable de- gree of priori probability, that the mass out of which, for example, the lunar Apennines were formed, was once beneath the waters of widely extending lunar ocean? On either side of the Apennines extend broad, dark tracts such as have long maintained, for quite different reasons, to be floors of ancient lunar seas. But these seas which, when the lunar Apennines were being raised, were separated by the rising range, must before that process have formed a single ocean. Hundreds of thousands of years must have passed while the mass of matter was being de- posited in a deep trough-like depres- sion, out of which the lunar Apennines were afterward to be carved and chiseled by process of denudation. During all this time layer after layer of matter was being deposited over the floor of the whole ocean, though of course more was collected in the de- pression than on either side of it. IT, regularities before existing on the sub merged surface would be obliterated by these deposited layers. The surface eventually disclosed when the waters had retreated would be level compared with the crater-covered regions which during those hundreds of thousands of years had remained above the ocean surface.
 But might we not expect to find some traces of the buried continents over which these deep layers of ocean mud had been spread? Multiplied experi- ences show how consistently such ir- regularities attest their presence, even when lying beneath depths ofdeposited matter such as we might expect to hide them altogether.
 When the so-called lunar "seas" are examined we find features which seem only applicable as precisely such traces of Iong-buried lunar lands we might expect to find. They have been called by some the ghosts of craters. They have the forms and dimensions of such craters as we find in other parts of the moon, but unlike them they are rather markings in a level surface than con- tour features. They cast no shadows, their interior is never cast into shadow. They differ from actual craters much as fairy rings differ from ringed wall having similar span.
 l have little hesitation myself in say ing that the so-called lunar seas speak not only of the past existence of ctual seas on the moon, but tell us of buried lunar lands, They tell us also some- thing of the history of our own buried continents, and enable us to read more clearly than we otherwise might the meaning of those traces of the former presence of water where now there is land which no doubt gave rise to the tradition, in nearly every land, of former flood.
 Lastly, if the moon tells us of the earth's remote past she foretells also her remote future, Already, accord ing to the geology of to-day, more than One-third of the waters once existing on the earth have disappeared. But the time will come when our earth, like the moon now, will only attest by dry sea floors the former existence of seas upon her crust. Another change also, scarcely less inconsistent with the belief that life will be possible for ever hereafter on the earth, is indi- cated on the moon. No one now be- lieves that the moons peculiar rota- tion, which results in keeping always the same lunar face turned earth ward, has existed forever. Doubt less the moon once, like the earth now, turned on her axis at such a rate as to have day of moderate length. Now. she has been constrained by ter restrial forces which must have re- quired million of years for their opera tion, to turn always at such a rate that she always looks with the same aspect on her ruling mistress. But if she thus tells us of past terrestrial influences on the moon, she threatens unmistakably thn nnrraSnnndinn action of lunaI. in=